As Sen Rodriguez knows, it pays to be connected. PERA’s money shifting. Heads up if you live in Greeley or know someone who does.

As Sen Rodriguez knows, it pays to be connected.

Following a reader tip, I did some digging on a business that Colorado Senator Robert Rodriguez’s wife runs. It is a business he is listed as the “Director of Business Management. Oddly enough, as you can see in the image heading this post, this title is left off his legislator profile.

The company name is RRK Enterprises, but it does business under the name Independence House. That company’s website is linked first below. Screenshot 1 attached shows both the company leadership and some of their business locations.

What does Independence House do? A variety of things, but they say their mission is to (quoting their site): “... monitor and manage offenders in both residential and non-residential environments, aligning them with treatment and vocational resources to best equip them for eventual community release.” They do this work in both outpatient and residential settings, with the facilities listed on the website.

Independence House contracts with both our state Department of Corrections (DOC) as well as the City and County of Denver. In order to learn more about how much RRK is paid and for what, I sent a CORA requests out to Denver, DOC, and the Colorado Department of Public Safety. I also ran a TOPS expense report.

The results are all in the shared folder linked second below. They are named in such a way as to not be hard to figure out which is which.

Screenshots 2a and 2b show the scope of work that RRK provides for Denver on their contract which runs from 2023 to 2026 (by comparison, the TOPS expense report shows our state contracting with and giving grants to RRK since at least fiscal year 2015). Lots of jargon there, but clearly a lot of what they do is provide substance abuse treatment of one kind or another.**

The amendment to the contract (signed in late 2024) shows a couple interesting things. Screenshot 3 attached shows the first on the list.

RRK got quite a raise in 2024 (the date the amended contract was signed). Their maximum billable amount jumped from $50K to $190K. For whatever reason (they liked RRK’s work, the number of people needing RRK’s services went up), Denver saw fit in 2024 to nearly quadruple their pay to RRK.

The second interesting thing is how the required qualifications of RRK’s employees were rubbed out. I mean completely rescinded. Goned.

Screenshot 4 shows the full qualifications from the original contract, the full paragraph 25 which the amended contract deletes.

This is curious. It’s all the more curious given that the part of the Denver code referenced relates to job qualifications. After digging a little (and talking to someone who offered what might be some insight into the issues), I think there is perhaps enough here to warrant further digging. I don’t have space to cover that here, but keep your eyes and ears open for a deeper look into that when and if I have time. If you know some backstory and/or have some evidence of something to share, let me know.

Like Denver, our state DOC also pays lots of money to RRK. The TOPS report in the shared file shows that the DOC paid about $88K to RRK in fiscal year 2025 alone. By way of contrast, Denver’s $190K maximum was paid over 3 years, and the Colorado Department of Public Safety, Division of Criminal Justice paid out about $2600 in grants in fiscal year 2025. We’ll touch on the Division of Criminal Justice shortly.

I did a CORA request to the DOC to get a couple invoices from this and last fiscal year. You’ll find them in the shared folder labeled as DOC invoice June and/or July. They’re heavily redacted (to protect banking info), but you get a sense of what RRK is doing for the state and how much they receive. DUI education and therapy seems to be a big seller. I had to chuckle noting the price on Substance Abuse Books and Material line item; clearly it isn’t just college that charges a lot for books!

Looking at page 2 on the June invoice, you can see that RRK billed for about $7100 for 122 services. That comes to an average of about $58 per service. Not a bad rate on average, I’m guessing.

Turning now to the grants from the Division of Criminal Justice, I hit a wall. I did a CORA request to the Division and what I got back was them telling me that they were treating it as a CCJRA request NOT a CORA request. In classifying it as such, they have more flexibility to deny sharing the records. Deny they did, citing protecting the privacy rights of the people involved as trumping the public’s right to know.

I followed up to ask whether this is the case with all their grants or just ones where a state senator is one of the recipients. I followed up to ask for redacted records (I really don’t care who may have been the one helped by the grant, I really just wanted to know what the grant program was paying for).

I have had no response back as of this writing.

I also sent an email to Senator Rodriguez and the woman listed as the CEO at RRK Enterprises via their RRK emails as well as Senator Rodriguez’s campaign and official state email address. I asked them what the grant was for and offered them a chance to send a statement (which I would include).

Again, as of this writing I have not heard back.

If that changes, if I hear from either, I’ll update.

Running a business which sells services to the government is a perfectly normal thing to do. It happens all the time. It’s also not automatic (nor am I alleging) that there is anything illegal going on here with Senator Rodriguez or any of the governmental entities mentioned.

The problem here is a similar one to what we see with State Representative Lorena Garcia and her NGO: there are legitimate concerns and questions raised when an officer of a business or nonprofit which provides services to the government is also involved in making decisions for that government.

It ought to make any reasonable person wary, because at the least, it’s swampy. It’s made all the swampier when you consider that RRK gets government grants, they got a huge bump in pay from Denver (along with relaxed restrictions), and when you look at one of Rodriguez’s sponsored bills from 2024 dealing with pretrial diversions.

SB24-006, linked third below, is mostly about childhood pretrial diversion programs, but there is this little bit near the end. Quoting the bill’s fiscal note:

“Finally, the bill allows criminal defendants that raise competency issues, or are found incompetent to proceed, to enter into a diversion program with district attorney and court approval.”

Put that with the following from Independence House’s site, and the picture clears up (quoting the Independence house site):

“Independence House Pecos (IHP) facility is a 75 bed male facility accepting DOC Transition and Denver county Diversion clients.”

Senator Rodriguez might be a fan of pretrial diversion as a way to manage people facing charges, he might think it’s a better option than trial or jail, but whether or not he believes in it as a good option, you cannot skirt the fact that this bill can expands his pool of potential clients.

Not illegal, swampy.

This is an impression greatly heightened by the fact that some departments of our government seems resistant to share information about the taxpayer-funded grants they put out. This is an impression bolstered by the fact that the senator cashing in on this also seems resistant.

As more and more people are looking into the finances of nonprofits, NGO’s, and state politicos, I imagine we will see more and more of what we’ve noted with Sen Rodriguez and Rep Garcia: the well connected in this state seem to have very little trouble in getting government money.

While none of this fits the legal definition of corruption, it speaks volumes about the political machinery running this state, who gets advantages others don’t, what fair play means to some in Colorado.

I look forward to learning more and calling it out in public.

**Including the euphemistic “medication assisted treatment”, read “methadone clinic”.

http://www.ind-house.com/index.html

https://drive.google.com/.../1BPqPVX2dVp8kO8emuO6LTfoEe9B...

https://leg.colorado.gov/bills/sb24-006

Related:

Another example of state legislators running laws which help their pocketbooks: Steve Woodrow’s bill greasing the skids for class action suits (such as one his firm was running).

More in the Complete piece below.


https://completecolorado.com/2024/03/01/steven-woodrow-payday-law-legislature/

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PERA’s money shifting

The Sun article below details a plan by Andrew Roth PERA’s** executive director. Skipping tremendous amounts of detail (which you can catch up on in the article), the salient points are these.

A 2018 law, written to put PERA on track (which it still isn’t), requires automatic adjustments when certain criteria are met. Quoting with links intact:

“The automatic adjustment provision was a key pillar of Senate Bill 200, the 2018 pension overhaul that brought PERA back from the brink of insolvency. The measure called for higher contributions from public workers and their employers, while reducing retiree cost-of-living adjustments so much that their pension checks now grow slower than inflation. It also triggered automatic benefit cuts and contribution hikes whenever the pension’s finances strayed too far from a 30-year path to full funding.”

In plainer language, since PERA was falling off its path to fully funding retirements, the law doesn’t require renewed action by the government: the law raises contributions and lowers benefits as a way to not end up underwater with payouts exceeding incoming money.

What Roth is proposing is a plan which would allow PERA to shuttle money around between various groups under PERA’s umbrella. A good analogy would be spending more time in the gym working your legs to bring them up to size while keeping the rest of your workouts in maintenance mode.

A trio of non-contiguous quotes flesh this out:

“...Roth wants lawmakers to let PERA divert all of the state’s $225 million annual payment to where it’s needed the most: the pensions of public school workers, which are the most underfunded of any of PERA’s five divisions. The school division has just 66% of the money it needs to pay benefits in perpetuity. It’s also the only division that isn’t on track to be fully funded by 2048, the target date set in state law. Local governments are expected to hit full funding by 2036, while the state division is expected to get there by 2044. But schools remain five years off course, with a projected full funding date of 2053.”

and

“PERA also wants to redirect half of the money employers pay into a health care trust fund (today it’s about 1% of payroll), and use it to pay off the pension’s unfunded debt instead. The health care trust subsidizes medical premiums for those enrolled in PERA’s Medicare Advantage plans. But its funding is in much better shape than the retirement plan. The trust fund is expected to be 100% funded within the next 5 years.”

lastly

“Finally, PERA is proposing to reduce contribution rates for public employees and government agencies in the two best-funded divisions: local government and judicial. Doing so wouldn’t have much effect on the pension’s overall finances, and both divisions would still be on a track to full funding within the next three to six years.”

A clever plan in my opinion. The important consideration, however, is not the cleverness but the risk vs. reward.

By this metric, the first scheme outlined above (shifting incoming pension monies to the lowest-performing group of retirees) seems a sound gamble. That is, I can’t imagine a big downside. The risk seems small.

The latter two seem riskier. Reducing contribution rates is something I think worth discussing, but I would only do so when I felt on firmer footing, when I felt I had more distance between myself and trouble. The medical shift also seems to bank on premiums not spiking, not a wise bet in my view given my personal experience with health insurance. I suppose I’d rather see the contributions stay the same for the two best-funded divisions and then take that “extra” money to pay down the debt.

I’ll update as I hear more. PERA is one of those things that seems to only affect a few public employees in the state, but you have to remember that its financial obligations are a hulking mass hiding in the shadows of the budget. If it falls over, we’ll all be feeling it.

**In the interest of full disclosure, I am a PERA member, but I am not in their defined benefit plan. I have the PERA equivalent of an IRA, their defined contribution plan.

https://coloradosun.com/2025/09/29/colorado-pera-auto-adjust-pension-reform-senate-bill-200/

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Heads up if you live in Greeley or know someone who does.

I did an op ed about the funny business the Greeley City Council is pulling with their entertainment complex, Certificates of Participation, and thwarting the will of the voters. I will put that up in due time because what happened there has implications for the whole state.

What I am putting below is time-sensitive so I wanted to get this out sooner rather than later.

There is some background and context in the article below, but the important thing here is that if you live in Greeley and/or know someone who does, and if you or they have an objection to what’s going on, they need to find and sign the petition by Greeley Demands Better.

The Channel 7 News story is linked first below and the Facebook page for Greeley Demands Better is linked second.

https://www.denver7.com/news/front-range/greeley/greeley-grassroots-group-fights-plans-for-1-1b-entertainment-district-featuring-arena-water-park

https://www.facebook.com/p/Greeley-Demands-Better-61577733696183/